Tuesday, 3 January 2017

Fukushima radiation has reached U.S. shores

For the
first time, seaborne radiation from Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster has been
detected on the West Coast of the United States.

Cesium-134,
the so-called fingerprint of Fukushima, was measured in seawater samples taken
from Tillamook Bay and Gold Beach in Oregon, researchers from the Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institution are reporting.

Because of
its short half-life, cesium-134 can only have come from Fukushima.

Also for the
first time, cesium-134 has been detected in a Canadian salmon, the Fukushima
InFORM project, led by University of Victoria chemical oceanographer Jay
Cullen, is reporting.

In both
cases, levels are extremely low, the researchers said[...]

Massive
amounts of contaminated water were released from the crippled nuclear plant
following a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami in March 2011. More radiation
was released to the air, then fell to the sea.

The Oregon samples,
marking the first time cesium-134 has been detected on U.S. shores, were taken
in January and February of 2016 and later analyzed. They each measured 0.3
becquerels per cubic meter of cesium-134.

Buesseler’s
team previously had found the isotope in a sample of seawater taken from a dock
on Vancouver Island, B.C., marking its landfall in North America.

(Photo: Christopher Furlong / Getty Images)

Meanwhile,
in Canada, Cullen leads the InFORM
project to assess radiological risks to that country’s oceans following the
nuclear disaster. It is a partnership of a dozen academic, government and
non-profit organizations, including Woods Hole.

Last month,
the group reported that a single sockeye salmon, sampled from Okanagan Lake in
the summer of 2015, had tested positive for cesium-134.

The level
was more than 1,000 times lower than the action level set by Health Canada, and
is no significant risk to consumers, Cullen said.

Buesseler’s
most recent samples off the West Coast also are showing higher-than background
levels of cesium-137, another Fukushima isotope that already is present in the
world's oceans because of nuclear testing in the 1950s and 1960s.

Those
results will become more important in tracking the radiation plume, Buesseler
said, because the short half-life of cesium-134 makes it harder to detect as
time goes on.

Cesium-134
has a half-life of two years, meaning it’s down to a fraction of what it was
five years ago, he said. Cesium-137 has a 30-year half-life.

A recent
InFORM analysis of Buesseler’s data concluded that concentrations of cesium-137
have increased considerably in the central northeast Pacific[...]

“It appears
that the plume has spread throughout this vast area from Alaska to California,”
the scientists wrote.

They
estimated that the plume is moving toward the coast at roughly twice the speed
of a garden snail. Radiation levels have not yet peaked.“As the
contamination plume progresses towards our coast we expect levels closer to
shore to increase over the coming year,” Cullen said[...] But the models will help
scientists model ocean currents in the future.

That could
prove important if there is another disaster or accident at the Fukushima
plant, which houses more than a thousand huge steel tanks of contaminated water
and where hundreds of tons of molten fuel remain inside the reactors.

In a
worst-case scenario, the fuel would melt through steel-reinforced concrete
containment vessels into the ground, uncontrollably spreading radiation into
the surrounding soil and groundwater and eventually into the sea.

“That’s the
type of thing where people are still concerned, as am I, about what could
happen,” Buesseler said.

Scientists
now know it would take four to five years for any further contamination from
the plant to reach the West Coast.

Tracking
the plume

Scientists
are beginning to use an increase in cesium-137 instead of the presence of cesium-134
to track the plume of radioactive contamination from Japan’s Fukushima nuclear
disaster. These figures show the increase in cesium-137 near the West Coast
between 2014 and 2015.

New Illuminati comments:
The situation has been far worse than reported by most mainstream media for a long
while now. Please listen to Jim Rense and guests describe the true depth of the
horror facing our planet:

Fukushima & Pacific Ocean Health ☢ Update

Almost six years after Fukushima, crisis continues

Radiation in
the Pacific Ocean near Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant is at levels as high, or
higher,
than has been measured in the past three years, as the crippled plant continues
to bleed contamination into the sea, new results from a Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institution research cruise show.

“We think
it’s related to the ongoing leaks,” said Ken Buesseler, a Woods Hole chemical
oceanographer who is among a handful of scientists studying the contamination
and its path across the ocean to North America. “It’s a little surprising and
contrary to claims they’ve stopped all flow. So we’re not out of the woods
yet.”

[It’s been
almost six] years since a 9.0 magnitude undersea earthquake shook the Tohoku
area, 170 miles north of Tokyo. Fifty minutes after the shaking stopped, a wall
of water arrived, reaching heights of 130 feet and moving inland as much as six
miles in some places. About 20,000 people died, mostly from drowning.

The tsunami
swamped Fukushima Daiichi’s seawall, knocking out power to four of its six
nuclear reactors. Without power to pump cooling water, three of those reactors
melted down, spewing radiation into the air and sea. It was the worst nuclear
disaster since Chernobyl, in 1986.

Unlike
Chernobyl, however, this crisis played out slowly, and continues today, on both
sides of the Pacific.

At the
plant, hundreds of tons of molten fuel remain inside the reactors.

TEPCO, the
Japanese utility that operates the plant, hopes someday to remove the fuel, but
the technology to do so does not exist today. Experts aren’t even sure where it
is – two attempts last year to send in robot cameras failed.

In a
worst-case scenario, the fuel would melt through the steel-reinforced concrete
containment vessels into the ground, uncontrollably spreading radiation into
the surrounding soil and groundwater and eventually into the sea.

For now,
pumps pour a constant stream of water into the vessels and TEPCO collects the
water that leaks out, as well as groundwater that continues to filter through
the plant.

All that
contaminated water is filtered to remove some – but not all – of the dangerous
radionuclides. It’s stored onsite in huge steel tanks which now number
more than 1,100.

Another
earthquake or tsunami could wash that contaminated water back into the sea.

“There is a
lot more strontium on the site in the tanks than was ever released in 2011,”
Buesseler said. “A catastrophe today could change things completely in three to
five years on the West Coast.”

In October
2015, Buesseler’s team took new samples from as close as a half-mile away
from the nuclear power plant.

Levels there
remain elevated, he said, confirming continued releases from the plant.

The levels
are thousands of times lower than during the peak in 2011, Buesseler said, and
most fish near the plant now are below regulatory limits for radiation.

Still, he
said, “The fact that it’s still leaking is always of concern. We don’t want
additional radioactivity in the ocean.”

(Photo:
Jessica Drysdale, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

Five
thousand miles across the Pacific, on the West Coast of North America, the
disaster continues to play out as well.

Shortly
after the earthquake, a tsunami warning was issued for most of the West Coast
and all of Oregon. Tsunami surges of as much as 8 feet hit some areas, causing
major damage at ports in Brookings and in Crescent City, Calif.

Brookings
has received about $7 million in state and federal funding to rebuild.

In late
March 2011, radiation showed up in rainwater and milk samples along the West
Coast, although at levels officials said were too low to be of health concern.

That was
followed, beginning about a year later, by a wave of tsunami debris, including
a 188-ton, 66-foot-long dock that arrived on Agate Beach on June 4, 2012.

In this 2012 photo, a man looks at the tsunami dock that washed ashore on Agate Beach in Newport. (Photo: AP)

As it dealt
with its own cleanup and recovery, Japan made a gift of $5 million to the
United States to help clean up tsunami debris.

Of that,
Oregon received $250,000, and just finished spending it all in January 2016.

Now, the
state will take the focus off of tsunami debris, but continue its push to
prevent and clean up all marine debris, said Chris Havel, spokesman for the
Oregon Parks and Recreation Department, which has jurisdiction over the state’s
beaches.

“Some of the
debris that’s washing ashore is almost certainly from the tsunami, but a lot of
it is not,” Havel said. “We’re seeing a lot of stuff that’s just falling off
ships from our own community.”

The state
still will fund its 211 phone system to take calls about debris. And it still
will provide garbage bags and pick them up for disposal. But it’s currently
changing its beach signs to read “marine debris watch” rather than “tsunami
debris watch,” Havel said.

Initial
concerns that the debris might be radioactive were soon put to rest, but the
real threat of invasive species remains, said Caren Braby, marine resources
program manager for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.

The dock,
for example, harbored 118 species of foreign marine life.

“It
essentially was like a spaceship going out and finding a new planet,” Braby
said. “We had built them this transport mechanism to get from there to here.”

None of the
species has yet taken a foothold, as far as scientists can tell. And the risk
decreases over time, Braby said. But, she said, “Ten, 20, 30 years from now, we
might discover one of these species has been able to establish a reproductive
population.”

Meanwhile,
in the absence of any government testing, Woods Hole’s Buesseler launched a
crowd-funded, citizen-science project to track the radiation plume across the
Pacific.

Volunteers
collect seawater samples from sites all along the West Coast, then send them to
Buesseler’s lab in Massachusetts to be tested.

Buesseler
also partnered with other organizations to collect samples at sea and along the
coast of Japan.

In October
2014, Buesseler reported that a sample taken about 745 miles west of Vancouver,
British Columbia, tested positive for cesium-134, the so-called fingerprint of
Fukushima because it can only have come from the plant.

The sample
also showed higher-than-background levels of cesium-137, another Fukushima
isotope that already is present in the world's oceans because of nuclear
testing in the 1950s and 1960s.

In November
2014, Buesseler reported that Fukushima radiation had been identified in 10
offshore samples, including one 100 miles off the coast of Eureka, California.

In April
2015, Buesseler's team announced it had found Fukushima radiation in a sample
of seawater taken from a dock on Vancouver Island, B.C., marking the first time
it was recorded on West Coast shores.

And in
December 2015, Buesseler reported the highest detected level to date, of 11
becquerels per cubic meter of seawater (about 264 gallons) in a sample
collected about 1,600 miles west of San Francisco.

Still, he
emphasizes, that’s 500 times lower than U.S. government safety limits for
drinking water.

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